Colbert: Only bad economic news is good news for Romney

On Monday night’s episode of “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert presented an edition of his recurring “The Word” segment devoted to Republicans and their desire to see the economy fail in order to improve Mitt Romney’s electoral chances in November.

The economy, Colbert said, has been “as sluggish as a slug at a slug convention.” (So bad, he claimed, that he had to let his metaphor writer go.) This is good news for Mitt Romney, whose entire campaign platform rests on his promise to fix an economy that President Barack Obama has been at odds to fix.

“The worse things are for John Q. Public, the better they are for Willard M. Private,” he said.

However, some key swing states are seeing unexpectedly positive rebounds in their economics numbers, which places them firmly at odds with Gov. Romney’s message, “which brings us,” Colbert said, “to tonight’s ‘The Word’: Silver Maligning,” the art of finding the bad news about the economy among the good news so as not to present too rosy a picture of your opponent’s handling of the economy.

For instance, in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott (R) is seeing some great new jobs numbers, a fact that his administration has been quick to emphasize in its recent messaging. This places it at odds with the Romney campaign’s message of an economy in flames.

Bloomberg reported last Thursday that the Romney campaign has asked Scott to downplay his state’s economic recovery so as not to give the president the advantage of claiming his policies have worked in Florida. Florida Republicans don’t seem to be heeding that message, because the state GOP released a report touting Florida’s good news mere hours after the Bloomberg article appeared.

“Republicans,” Colbert said, “need to all sing from the same hymnal,” and that means that no matter how good the news is, it must be spun in the “worst possible light for the president.”

About the Author

David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book.